Kara Swisher

Over the last few years, Luarene Powell Jobs, an activist, investor and entrepreneur, has been investing in media companies through her social impact firm, Emerson Collective. Buying up a range of unusual properties, she seems to be making an effort to turbocharge storytelling in this fractured digital age. It’s an interesting experiment to watch, because the investments include a panoply of the cool, hip and fresh in a mostly glum content industry.

Should American citizens get a new Bill of Rights for the internet? Given all the damage that giant tech companies have done of late, many Democrats think the answer is yes. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) even suggested that a new agency could be created to manage tech’s growing impact. “Something needs to be done,” she said to “protect the privacy of the American people” and “come up with overarching values” — a set of principles that everyone can agree on and adhere to. Call it a Bill of Rights for the internet.

BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith was confused as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. So while he’s not exactly Howard Beale, the famously pugnacious editor of BuzzFeed pressed hard recently on global news partnerships head Campbell Brown to explain how Facebook defines journalism and who practices it. The focus of his ire was the presence of six conservative publications at a biannual meeting that Brown ran recently with a group of editors and publishers Facebook works with.

[Of Note: The journalist responsible for this article was not present at the meeting]
At the top of the gathering between Silicon Valley executive and President-elect Donald Trump, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella brought up perhaps the most thorny issue: Immigration and how the government can help tech with things like H-1B visas to keep and bring in more talent. Nadella pointed out that much of the company’s spending on research and development was in the U.S., even if 50 percent of the sales were elsewhere, so that immigration would benefit those here. Surprisingly to the group, Trump apparently responded favorably, “Let’s fix that,” he said, without a specific promise, and then asked, “What can I do to make it better?” Apple CEO Cook brought up a related issue, that of science, technology engineering and math education, which has been a big initiative of President Barack Obama, and also was pushed by Trump’s campaign rival Hillary Clinton.

The STEM issue was also pushed hard by Facebook COO Sandberg, who focused Trump on that kind of education for women and underrepresented minorities. She then brought up the issue of paid maternity leave. In the campaign, Trump unveiled a plan for six weeks of leave for women, while Clinton was advocating for 12 weeks for parents of either sex. One of the most interesting exchanges was with Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who briefly noted that he pondered what he would do if he were president, and then made the point that governmental information-technology programs were antiquated and unsafe, and needed to be upgraded. Schmidt then suggested to Trump that he be the “software president,” a phrase Trump misheard as “soft” president. Trump was not going to be soft! Laughs all around!

In the end, I guess you could finally say Steve Case was right. Case led AOL to great power in the 1990s, and he then presided over what has become known as one of the worst mergers of all time, when he combined his high-flying Internet giant with Time Warner, back at the turn of the century. It was a truly epic move, all predicated on the very big idea that distribution and content had to marry in the digital age and that whoever did that successfully would rule the next era of media and more. It was also an epic failure, brought down by a toxic combination of timing and execution.
Which is to say that the body of Time Warner — made up of the mandarins of media whose power was waning, although they did not know it at the time — rejected the deal almost immediately and made sure it would never succeed, even as the fast-and-loose slicksters of AOL did everything possible to seem as lightweight as they still were at the time. You could write books on what went wrong — and I did — which raises the question of what Time Warner now thinks will go right in the deal it just struck with telecom giant AT&T to be taken out for $85 billion. As expected, the media has gone wild, dragged along breathlessly as they are for any holy-god deal, nearly forgetting that some of its current principals were the very same people who had been the biggest critics of the match-up of Time Warner and AOL.

[Commentary] With Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, we have now established a price floor for what it costs not to have a mobile operating system in a world in which having a mobile operating system counts for an awful lot these days.

And that means, for all intents and purposes, Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iOS. And not, despite various and sundry efforts, Facebook, which also has tried to create a mutated shell version of its own OS called Home.

But a mobile presence is a must-do in the current digital environment, and this massive acquisition makes it clear that Facebook has decided that its core strategy will be to create or buy up must-have apps that consumers demand to have on their mobile devices. It’s a little like deciding to be Disney, said one source, owning all the good content brands. If Facebook is Disney (by the way, its COO, Sheryl Sandberg, is on the entertainment giant’s board), then Instagram is the Disney Channel (the kids love it!) and WhatsApp is ESPN (everyone loves it!).